


Some Say

by TheLadyBlakeney



Category: Gotham (TV)
Genre: Gen, bridgit and victor are friends because they both Respect and Love Women, bridgit deserves the entire world, references to robert frost's poem about ice and fire, set during 5 but that's only tangentially important to this fic because we love character studies, we love foils!!
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-07-26
Updated: 2019-07-26
Packaged: 2020-07-20 15:37:13
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 670
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19994599
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/TheLadyBlakeney/pseuds/TheLadyBlakeney
Summary: Some say the world will end in ice. Some say it will end in fire.It’s an old argument, sort of a riddle, often quoted but seldom understood. Bridgit has her own thoughts on the matter, but as the world ends outside of the apartment that she’s sitting in, she can’t find it within herself to care.





	Some Say

**Author's Note:**

> part of a challenge for the Gotham Network over on tumblr, to celebrate minor and supporting characters, and i love my lesbian daughter and my son who Respects Women
> 
> unbeta'd? we die like bruce wayne's parents?

Some say the world will end in ice. Some say it will end in fire.

It’s an old argument, not quite a riddle, often quoted but seldom understood. Bridgit has her own thoughts on the matter, but as the world ends outside of the apartment that she’s sitting in, she can’t find it within herself to care.

“Is this her?”

Her fingers glide over the photograph frame, the glass feeling cool underneath her gloves.

Victor doesn’t have to glance at her to say, “Yes.”

“She’s beautiful.”

“She was.”

The past tense intrigues her.

She leans forward in her chair, which is surprisingly plush. Bridgit privately thinks of Victor as a hard man, all sharp edges and an icy heart - which, to be fair, _that_ is not too far off - but this, his apartment, where he lives, is mostly made of soft things.

“What happened to her?”

Bridgit doesn’t know really much anything about Victor. Just his name, and the fact that he (for rather obvious reasons) prefers the cold. And the last fact that she knows for certain about Victor Fries is that she hates him.

Or at least, she thinks she does.

“She died.”

His tone is clipped, but all non-answers are answers in themselves, and his is telling her that he doesn’t want to talk about it.

The old Bridgit would have left well enough alone, but this Bridgit knows how to bite back now if she needs to.

She switches subjects, affecting disinterest as she sits back slowly, relaxing her limbs, hoping to appear less like a feral cat waiting to strike, and hopefully instead projecting an image more akin to a coiled snake.

“Do you ever think of yourself as two different people? As a before and after?”

“Why do you want to know?” 

“You invited me here. I’m just trying to be a polite guest, make conversation. Besides, you and I are small fish now, in what’s become a very big pond. Nobody needs our business anymore. Not with half of the city in flames and the other controlled by mob rule.”

He turns to her fully. 

Bridgit thinks she’ll never have a better chance than this.

“You tried to freeze her, didn’t you?”

He takes a long time to respond, but when he does, he says the perfect words.

“To save her.”

Bridgit nods. It makes sense. The most that anything in Gotham has made sense for years.

Her hands trace over the frame that she’s still holding, and over the smiling woman forever frozen, preserved perfectly in all of her loveliness.

Bridgit thinks back to her own family.

She’s not sorry that she burned them. 

They were hardly people worth saving. In fact, she’d say that they deserved to burn.

The old her wouldn’t have said that. Too scared, perhaps. Too afraid of her own power, to acknowledge what they had done and condemn them, to sentence them. To become their judge, jury, executioner.

Now she doesn’t bat an eye when she sets a man aflame, as he turns into soot right in front of her eyes.

She’s always been derisive of Victor - didn’t he know that the only way to destroy something completely is to change its very chemical make-up? To eradicate it, to mutate it, to transform it?

She understands now. They have mutually exclusive goals - completely opposite in nature. Ice can be undone. Ice brings the promise of a future and a thaw. Ice preserves the past, saves the good, keeps something - or someone - alive forever.

Fire punishes the guilty, burns through chains, scorches the wicked.

And fire only ends when all its fuel has already been burned.

They eat together, quietly, and when she leaves the apartment, she tells him thank you.

And that she’s jealous of him.

“Why?” he asks.

“You had love and you lost it,” she says. “And that’s more than I’ve ever had.”

As she walks out into the ashes of Gotham, she finds that she knows the answer to the riddle.

She’s always known.


End file.
